“One Test to Rule Them All”: Joe DeRisi in Conversation with Carl Zimmer

Joe DeRisi never rests in his pursuit of new technologies for finding and fighting mystery diseases. As a teen in the 1980s, DeRisi watched the AIDS epidemic catch the medical establishment by surprise, and saw a stark reminder that despite all our advances, human scientific knowledge still lagged far behind the inventive nastiness of nature’s store of diseases.

In a widely read page-one article for The New York Times in 2014, science writer Carl Zimmer recounted a race against time, when DeRisi and colleagues used next-generation sequencing to successfully identify the pathogen of a Wisconsin boy whose rapidly worsening sickness had defied all conventional diagnostic techniques. In 2016, DeRisi was named co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, an unprecedented collaborative venture of UCSF, Stanford University and UC Berkeley that aims to “help cure, prevent or manage all disease in our children’s lifetime [and] to invent the future of life science research.”

Join DeRisi and Zimmer for a wide-ranging discussion on topics ranging from the Biohub’s ambitious Infectious Disease Initiative to the evolving role of philanthropy in fueling scientific research. UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood will open the session by welcoming participants to WCSJ@UCSF.